Cons:

The Getaway 2: Black Monday is a throwback of the most distressing kind. It hearkens back to a time when fancy narrative presentations ate into the bulk of developers' budgets, leaving their actual interactive elements high and dry. Sure, in place of full-motion video we have stables of actors and high-tech motion capture techniques, but the sentiment is the same. Ditto with the results: Black Monday's cutscenes are presented in manner that few games, if any, can match. But in the gameplay department, it's just plain hurt. Maybe some of the techniques utilized by Team Soho are pioneering and groundbreaking. Indeed, I would say that if developers feel the need to utilize cutscenes in their games, they should all look this good. But if there isn't a substantial game experience there to make them relevant, it's all smoke and mirrors.

Odd Couplings

As you've probably gathered, Black Monday's strongest assets are its story and characters, and the impressive ways in which they're presented. The yarn itself revolves around the fates of three unlikely protagonists: Mitch, a stoic, world-weary London cop; Eddie, a struggling middleweight fighter-cum-bankrobber; and Sam, a computer hacker with something of a wounded dove complex. But before the game is over (around ten hours, if you take your time), you'll have fully embroiled yourself in the affairs of a sultry investigative journalist, a few members of Mitch's police force, a slew of Slavic and West Indian gang members, and a number of Eddie's unscrupulous cohorts.

If you've played the previous game, then you'll have justifiable high expectations for the game's narrative presentation, and provided that is your primary motivation for playing Black Monday, then you won't be disappointed. The characters are emotive in-game, and their parts are superbly acted with realistic dialogue (to a non-Londoner, anyway), and fluid, human movements. The techniques that Team Soho used to "capture" the casts' performances (which apparently involves strapping an enormous apparatus to the actors' shoulders that caps the movement of their faces) paid off brilliantly. The results are characters that move in manners more lifelike and believable than any I've ever seen. Yes, they're simplistic from a technical standpoint, but even considering that, the weight of effect is far from lost.

Too bad all this falls apart once you're forced to deal with the actual game behind Black Monday.

Criminal Apprehension

For a game that concerns itself so much with immersion, The Getaway 2 seems to go out of its way to tear you out of the experience by means of sloppy gameplay mechanics. It's evident even in the way you move; the controls are sluggish and non-responsive, with some the most essential bits of functionality absent, or underdeveloped. The right stick allows you to pivot the camera slightly, for instance, instead of allowing you full control of your view. This is mildly annoying when you have to traverse tight environments, and supremely frustrating when you get shot in the back of the head because it took you too long to perform an about-face.